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Gandhi meets the Japanese press (Photo: Nexco)

With Gandhi in Japan

Saturday, May 15, 2010
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Mike Brown from Adelaide joined Rajmohan Gandhi and his wife Usha for a week hosted by IofC Japan, as part of the IofC International President's 14-nation “Voyage of Dialogue and Discovery”. Mike writes:

Gandhi meets the Japanese press

In 1955 four Australian ex-servicemen visited Japanese Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama. Les Norman, a Liberal politician, had been a prisoner-of-war in Changi. Gil Duthie, a Labor MP, had lost his brother on the Burma railroad. The two others were war-time airmen Jim Coulter and Stan Shepherd.

Their two-week mission seeking reconciliation, hosted by MRA (IofC) Japan and financed by ex-servicemen and women in Australia, was “the most rewarding experience of my 30 years in politics”, said Duthie, then ALP Chief Whip in Canberra. On return they delivered a message of goodwill to Australian Prime Minister Menzies who, within two years, went on his first post-war visit to Japan and then welcomed Prime Minister Kishi to Canberra where Kishi made his historic apology in Parliament House.  (Full story in my book, No Longer Down Under. Grosvenor Books 2002).

Last month Hatoyama's grandson – the current Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama – welcomed Rajmohan Gandhi, President of IofC International, in his office. Gandhi appreciated Hatoyama's focus on understanding the moral roots of economic crisis, and his striving for an East-Asian community, which Gandhi suggested could be based on agreed moral principles.

Gandhi's message to the Prime Minister was simple. In the following week he repeated and expanded it in speeches, receptions, media interviews and at the 33rd Annual international conference of IofC Japan which came at the end of his stay.

He spelt it out in a two hour lecture before 230 at the Yukio Ozaki Memorial Foundation. Ozaki is known as Japan's “father of parliamentary government” and Gandhi began by recalling Ozaki's daughter, Yukika Sohma, “one of the most unforgettable people I have met... Her love for Japan was combined with care for the whole world.”

[img_assist|nid=48348|title=|desc=Rajmohan and Usha Gandhi meeting with
some of the youth assisting IofC, Japan (Photo: Mike Brown)|link=none|align=right|width=257|height=157]Picking up Hatoyama's concept of forming an East-Asian community, Gandhi urged it go further: that Japan should lead in forming “an independent Asia community”, spanning all the countries from East Asia to South-East, Central and West Asia, to shoulder the burdens of the planet in cooperation with, not opposition to, the West.

Initiatives of Change was supporting such a vision “by creating a non-state, small-scale, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious community across Asia where we know one another, care for another, are sensitive to one another”.

Back in the Sixties I remember we talked of a “strategic triangle” of Japan, India and Australia working together to counter the expanding Communist materialism. Today humanity faces the global challenges of economic chaos, inexcusable poverty and suffering, and climate change.

Gandhi saw a future Asian community as: democratic, free of imposition of any religious or sectarian views, working for the reduction of the nuclear danger and peaceful resolution of disputes, “pro-poor, pro-weak and therefore, pro-women”. It would work for a clean environment, and would place “need over greed, bread over bombs”.

The response, at the lecture and everywhere, demonstrated that there is a hunger and a capacity in Japan to break out of the self-absorption of its present economic woes and to respond to such a challenge.